Kosketuskäyttöliittymän toteuttaminen olemassa olevaan ohjelmaan

The purpose of this work was to evaluate the migration steps of a windowing desktop application into a touch based input enabled software. The study was conducted on an already existing building information modelling software called Tekla BIMsight. The task was to retain all the functionality already in the software while making it possible to be used on touch-enabled devices, such as tablets or convertible laptops with a swivel display. Design and implementation of the system has been documented as part of the thesis, as well as most problematic issues during this period. The effects of the implementation are validated and tested with real users and the results from that study were documented. The usability study was conducted to obtain quantitative and qualitative metrics of the usability. The nature of the input mechanism, direct or indirect, affects the user experience greatly. The final system should be as responsive as possible to maintain a good level of perceived performance. Early prototyping and access to the target devices is critical to the success of a migration process. There are several common mistakes that should be avoided in the design and implementation phases. Not all the problems were critical, but many of them were identified as very cumbersome for the user that would affect the positive user experience of the software. With each new context for a user interface the problems need to be solved again and only experience from such solutions can help alleviate this task. The implemented touch support can be verified to meet the set requirements very well: It allows the system to be used on touch based input environments and all the major user interface elements support this.Työn tarkoituksena oli toteuttaa ja arvioida toimenpiteet ja. menetelmät joilla olemassa olevaan käyttöliittymään voidaan lisätä tuki kosketuskäytölle. Ominaisuudet lisättiin rakennusten tietomallinnuksen tarkasteluohjelmaan, Tekla BIMsight. Tehtävänä oli säilyttää kaikki aiemmat toiminnot ja tehdä ohjelmasta tehokkaasti käytettävä kosketuslaitteilla, kuten tableteilla ja kääntyvällä näytöllä varustetuilla kannettavilla. Suunnittelu ja toteutus järjestelmälle on dokumentoitu työssä ja kaikkein vaativimmat ongelmat. Toteutetun tuen vaikutuksia arvioitiin oikeiden käyttäjien kanssa tehdyssä käyttäjätutkimuksessa, jonka tulokset on esitetty. Käytettävyystutkimuksella hankittiin kvantitatiivista ja kvalitatiivista tietoa tuotteesta. Laite jolla ohjelmistoa käytetään vaikuttaa ohjelmasta saatuun käyttökokemukseen merkittävästi. Hyvän käyttökokemuksen saavuttamiseksi lopullisen järjestelmän käytön tulisi olla sujuvaa. Aikaisten prototyyppien kokeilu ja kohdelaitteiden saatavuus ovat tärkeitä tekijöitä siirtymäprosessin kannalta. Yleisiä ongelmatilanteita ja haasteita joita kohdattiin suunnittelu- ja toteutusvaiheissa on listattu työssä. Loppukäyttäjän kannalta useat ongelmat olivat rasittavia ja vaikuttaisivat käyttökokemukseen negatiivisesti jos niitä ei korjata. Uuden käyttöympäristön tuomat ongelmat joudutaan ratkaisemaan aina uudestaan. Vain kokemuksella vastaavista tilanteista on merkittävästi etua itse ratkaisujen löytämiselle. Toteutetun kosketuskäyttöliittymän tuen voidaan todeta vastaavan sille asetettuja tavoitteita ja vaatimuksia hyvin; se mahdollistaa ohjelman käyttämisen kosketuskäyttöliittymän omaavissa laitteissa ja kaikkein merkittävimmät käyttöliittymäelementit on tuettuina

Collaborative Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays - BigWallHCI 2013 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop

The 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays in Situation Rooms and Monitoring Centres was co-organised by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, Austria. It took place in the European Crisis Management Laboratory (ECML) of the JRC in Ispra, Italy, from 18 to 19 April 2013. 40 participants from stakeholders in the EC, civil protection bodies, academia, and industry attended the workshop. The hardware of large display areas is on the one hand mature since many years and on the other hand changing rapidly and improving constantly. This high pace developments promise amazing new setups with respect to e.g., pixel density or touch interaction. On the software side there are two components with room for improvement: 1. the software provided by the display manufacturers to operate their video walls (source selection, windowing system, layout control) and 2. dedicated ICT systems developed to the very needs of crisis management practitioners and monitoring centre operators. While industry starts to focus more on the collaborative aspects of their operating software already, the customized and tailored ICT applications needed are still missing, unsatisfactory, or very expensive since they have to be developed from scratch many times. Main challenges identified to enhance big wall display systems in crisis management and situation monitoring contexts include: 1. Interaction: Overcome static layouts and/or passive information consumption. 2. Participatory Design & Development: Software needs to meet users’ needs. 3. Development and/or application of Information Visualisation & Visual Analytics principle to support the transition from data to information to knowledge. 4. Information Overload: Proper methods for attention management, automatic interpretation, incident detection, and alarm triggering are needed to deal with the ever growing amount of data to be analysed.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Designing for Shareable Interfaces in the Wild

Despite excitement about the potential of interactive tabletops to support collaborative work, there have been few empirical demonstrations of their effectiveness (Marshall et al., 2011). In particular, while lab-based studies have explored the effects of individual design features, there has been a dearth of studies evaluating the success of systems in the wild. For this technology to be of value, designers and systems builders require a better understanding of how to develop and evaluate tabletop applications to be deployed in real world settings. This dissertation reports on two systems designed through a process that incorporated ethnography-style observations, iterative design and in the wild evaluation. The first study focused on collaborative learning in a medical setting. To address the fact that visitors to a hospital emergency ward were leaving with an incomplete understanding of their diagnosis and treatment, a system was prototyped in a working Emergency Room (ER) with doctors and patients. The system was found to be helpful but adoption issues hampered its impact. The second study focused on a planning application for visitors to a tourist information centre. Issues and opportunities for a successful, contextually-fitted system were addressed and it was found to be effective in supporting group planning activities by novice users, in particular, facilitating users’ first experiences, providing effective signage and offering assistance to guide the user through the application. This dissertation contributes to understanding of multi-user systems through literature review of tabletop systems, collaborative tasks, design frameworks and evaluation of prototypes. Some support was found for the claim that tabletops are a useful technology for collaboration, and several issues were discussed. Contributions to understanding in this field are delivered through design guidelines, heuristics, frameworks, and recommendations, in addition to the two case studies to help guide future tabletop system creators

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming: 18th International Conference, XP 2017, Cologne, Germany, May 22-26, 2017, Proceedings

agile software development; lean development; scrum; project management; software developmen

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with

Adapting Multi-touch Systems to Capitalise on Different Display Shapes

The use of multi-touch interaction has become more widespread. With this increase of use, the change in input technique has prompted developers to reconsider other elements of typical computer design such as the shape of the display. There is an emerging need for software to be capable of functioning correctly with different display shapes. This research asked: ‘What must be considered when designing multi-touch software for use on different shaped displays?’ The results of two structured literature surveys highlighted the lack of support for multi-touch software to utilise more than one display shape. From a prototype system, observations on the issues of using different display shapes were made. An evaluation framework to judge potential solutions to these issues in multi-touch software was produced and employed. Solutions highlighted as being suitable were implemented into existing multi-touch software. A structured evaluation was then used to determine the success of the design and implementation of the solutions. The hypothesis of the evaluation stated that the implemented solutions would allow the applications to be used with a range of different display shapes in such a way that did not leave visual content items unfit for purpose. The majority of the results conformed to this hypothesis despite minor deviations from the designs of solutions being discovered in the implementation. This work highlights how developers, when producing multi-touch software intended for more than one display shape, must consider the issue of visual content items being occluded. Developers must produce, or identify, solutions to resolve this issue which conform to the criteria outlined in this research. This research shows that it is possible for multi-touch software to be made display shape independent

Interaction design for situated media production teams

PhD ThesisMedia production teams are the backbone of many media industries including television, sport gatherings and live music events. These domains are characterised by a key set of situational factors which significantly impact on the collaborative production workflow, such as temporality, professional concerns and mission criticality. The availability of new interaction technologies presents an opportunity to design systems to support these teams in these complex environments, leveraging the affordances of interaction technologies in response to the situated factors that impact specifically on these types of domains. StoryCrate and ProductionCrate, two large-scale real-world prototype systems for supporting situated media production teams were designed and deployed to explore the interaction design considerations that could support these teams in specific scenarios. Through an extensive analysis of these deployments, key design considerations, interaction techniques and modalities are presented that can be developed in response to the situational factors found in collaborative media production environments

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

Designing Pleasurable Robotic Experiences to Support Connectedness for Seminar Attendees

People attend seminars to get to know other individuals in the field and gain expert knowledge while networking and socializing. Although networking is beneficial to build a relationship with others, some people find it to be challenging. The challenge is in the fact that not everyone contributes to conversations or they are too shy to approach strangers and break the ice. There are different ice-breaker solutions developed to make the process easier for event attendees to socialize with unfamiliar people. For example, there are wearable technologies available that use proximity sensors to connect people with similar interests at events. Mobile phone applications are also very popular to use and make it possible for event attendees to connect before or after events. Similarly, interactive tabletops can also be ice-breakers and assist people to connect through multi-user interactions. However, social robots have not been studied in event context, although previous work has shown that they can be used as facilitators and mediators for connectedness in general. In this thesis, we have used a social robot called Pepper to study how robots can act as facilitators of social connectedness among strangers at events and create pleasurable and positive user experiences for event attendees. While there has been few earlier research in social connection using virtual assistants and social robots, physical social robots have never been studied as facilitators of connectedness at events. In order to identify if social robots can act as facilitators of connectedness, and create pleasurable and positive experiences for seminar attendees, we have conducted a pilot study and two field trials with overall 55 participants. In our pilot study (n=12), our goal was to gather feedback from university staff and students on the topic of social robots as facilitators of connectedness. In the field trials, we gathered information and feedback from the target users on the two concepts we implemented in the Pepper robot to address their needs and requirements. The concept for the first field trial was a Welcoming application to give information on the seminar. And the second concept for the second field trial was a simple two player game for event participants to play and connect to each other. In the first field trial (n=31), we took insights from our pilot study and conducted a field study with seminar attendees to gather feedback from the real users on a Welcoming application. For the second field trial (n=12), we created a prototype of an interaction concept called Color Game based on the feedback gathered from the earlier studies, and evaluated it at an event. The empirical research of this thesis includes surveys, interviews, and observations through qualitative and quantitate methods of data gathering and analysis. The findings suggest that social robots have the potential of becoming facilitators of connectedness at events, and participants had mostly positive and pleasurable experiences evoked by social robots and concepts during the events. Social robots can become acceptable ice-breakers at events by providing the attendees with fun and entertaining activities, such as games. Most participants expressed having fun and joyful interactions with the robot, and their experiences with the evaluated applications were positive . Positive experiences made it possible for attendees to accept social robots as ice-breakers and as means to connect and become familiar with strangers during events. Although in the study we found out that the majority of participants were interested in social robots, it is important for robotic platforms to follow certain guidelines to create better interactions and experiences for users. Thus, we have created a list of design implications which can be used for future developments of social robotic as ice-breakers at events, and also to contribute to the field of human-robotic interaction